


Leaving Home

by Zafaria



Category: Original Work, Wizard101
Genre: No Warnings, Wizard101 - Freeform, just sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 01:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20827013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: One day, we all depart home.





	Leaving Home

If the day was to be good, it would have been sunny; but instead it was bitter night under the harsh sky, the many pinhole eyes of the stars burning through the black mask, watching; the train was delayed. Janice’s outset to the future was missing.

It was a big moment, or at least it was working itself up to be one, like the tense knot pooling in her stomach building bigger and bigger and bigger  _ until... _

Well, who knows? Something surely. There was the fantastic celebration, the colored balloons bright red and green and her favorite teal, streamers strung between the wooden poles staked up in the commons that functioned as the schoolyard, ribbons neatly tucked into little bows and wrapped around each pole before exiting behind, out of sight, and running along to the next stake. The streamers hung a little low for the people’s heads, the bottom where they sagged and bowed brushing crowns in a gentle and papery, loving manner. The commons dressed up in its bold colors was congratulatory. It was nostalgic, all the bright colors of those timeless classes on display, the primary and simple reds and blues and yellows. 

Then there was the dire marble statue of, her. Yes, it was her likeness indeed, standing tall, leaning back so slightly, one hand wrapped on the hilt of a broadsword as long as her torso down, plunging into the ground of the statue. The other hand was waved to the side, angled just below the shoulder, palm up in a flourish. Something with a matter-of-fact aura. Something confident. Something. Too confident.

There had been few facts, and sparser confidence. 

“Is it over?” Janice had asked the Great Tree. He was an oak, maybe; long snarled branches with huge circular knots, rusty leaves and leaves like old paper and leaves the color of hot chocolate and warm things, comforting things.

“...Can it ever be truly over?”

It was not an answer that had helped her. She was tired, she was weary. The time for sage wisdoms had passed, and it passed long before, when a land, people, houses, lives were gone in a comet, a quick celestial  _ flourish _ .

God, she hated that word. It had reminded her of the elegant way the Raven appeared in a single, swift movement behind her as she crawled through dark forests. An astral projection, a living constellation; one moment she didn’t see it and then quickly, suddenly, the shape would materialize.

“Bartleby, where is my sister?”

“Where do you think she is?”

“Bartleby, is she dead?”

“...”

“Is she alive?”

“Perhaps so, and perhaps not. Perhaps she is both.”

“...No.”

For being divine, for all the struggle of finding that eye like a large glass marble, it hadn’t done much good for the old tree. Or maybe it had, but his usual manner of enigmatic advice was unwelcomed by her at the time. It wasn’t enough, and at the same time, it was all too much.

She was waiting now, days away from that foggy moment, marble statue left behind like a ghost, like her specter over the land. She was waiting now, on a platform for a train that would take her to something else, something clear and less tremendous. She was waiting now. She wasn’t sure what for.

Some days she waited to be called to Celestia to be a diplomat and have a future that was important, but not heroic. Sometimes days she waited for the days to evaporate and be gone. Some days she waited for her sister to come back, for the things you cannot simply wait for. The things that don’t pay dividends to those that don’t seek them out.

She lived in two places, ever: the frigid little house of her family in Grizzleheim before her parents sent her off to school, and then the school. She was recently given an apartment at the Arkanum, her new research institute, but she hadn’t settled in to the fiery-veined marble pillars and onyx slate floors. She… wasn’t happy there. She wasn’t happy much of anywhere, but certainly not there. Not in the close quarters with the other brilliant minds, locked away in their own research. They weren’t oblivious to the universe around them, rather, they were apathetic. They didn’t care. The rest of the worlds could live or they could die, or do something in between, and that little ship, the Arkanum, would still bobble around in space, the scholars would still research, and then they’d look up from their desk and see the world, or maybe they wouldn’t and they would just think to themselves “hmm, how sad”, whether life continued in its mangled way or ceased to do so or was some horrendous abomination of both potentials.

_ No _ , she decided,  _ this is not how I want my life to go _ .

She wanted to wander. Nowhere new, she wanted to return to the places she had been so rushed through before, the places she wanted to fall in love with. She even wanted to return to smoldering little Xibalba, floating out there now, disconnected from the rest of the worlds. There were ships, though; the Arkanum was one after all, and so certainly there would be one to charter or even pilot herself to make that pilgrimage, that special, solemn journey where she could sit on ashen land and cry away from the sight of living souls and fumble out an awkward, meaningless apology. 

And she could go back to Wintertusk on Leif’s sturdy rowboat, brisk air surrounding her as she pulled it closer to the shelf of ice where the dock was. Then what? She would walk through the snow over the hills and wind around the mountain top, enter Nodrilund where her sister’s house was, but then what would she do? Stare at the stone cairns that she piled up outside the doors, placing one rock for every day for two or three years when her sister had been gone? She hadn’t kept up with the practice. Her sister was still gone. The cairn towers around the front of her house looked like a stone half-wall.

She chose to go to Celestia and look for work. They liked her, she liked them. She didn’t like living in a fish bowl, and how the sky looked always like murky night because of the tons of water between her and the air. She didn’t like the perpetual feeling of heaviness and crushing from living under the gravity of the sky and the land and the water and the fish. But she didn’t like much, not from there, not from any place. Every place had to be re-investigated because she wanted to see some good, some kinder aspects than the traitors and loss she had found in her rushed travels through the worlds. Though she was fast, the people were mean, death drew in close to her and then always slunk away to return later in some other dark cave or in a whispered conversation in dying light. That was why she wanted to see the worlds and why she wanted to love them, to scour them for those bright colors like streamers in the commons, those quiet places like the deserted train platform. She wanted to prove to herself that even without her sister, the universe still had some kindness it could pay back to her.

It came all at once, like the rush of the train would when it finally arrived, an overwhelming sensation that permeated her ears and her eyes and her nose and her mouth. Her hands grew clammy and her eyes stung and she could taste bitter iron metal and salt, not of train sparks or squealing wheels, though. And she heard everything, acutely, a lonely crescendo on that quiet platform in the yellow lights. 

That long winding train wasn’t going to come for her. The ghosts of Xibalba weren’t going to reanimate and come to find her and cry with her and say how it had all been a horrible, terrible dream. Her sister wasn’t going to come for her.

She counted her coins as she walked away, down back to Olde Town and the three rivers. She carried a lot on her, her friends paid her well for her help during those years in all those worlds.

It was a crusty little boat with no leg room or room for her trunk that she would travel on. She was travelling light, and it was the lightest she had travelled in years, those rotten sour memories left waiting for that train. She carried with her her unassuming usual backpack. And she carried with her, tucked somewhere between the fibers of her tunic and her cape and under the large elliptical cameo pin that held one over the other, a small thread of hope, the last thread on her thinned out spool of yarn.

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks for the years in the fandom. I don't know if I'm shuttering the doors on my craft with this, but my characters' stories are at an end. I'm proud of them. I'm proud of me.
> 
> I'm proud of you too.


End file.
